How Haircuts Helped Me Overcome Sexual Abuse

“The pillow gently held my newly naked scalp."

I couldn't stop thinking about how the pillow gently held my newly naked scalp. I had never allowed that part of my body to feel so open to sensation, the evening's breeze playfully biting all the places I'd previously kept hidden. My haircut was so impulsive to anyone who was not living in my body.

Until the age of 11, I spent my mornings with my cat huddled close to the vent next to the toilet, both of us quietly observing my mother pull curlers out of her thin dyed hair. Heat-strained strands uprooted, floating toward me in slow motion. I spent my nights at the same mirror picking at my scalp until it bled color, horrified at the thought of ever becoming bald and revealing my scars.

A man touched these unhealed wounds without even noticing them. I stood before him for my annual haircut and undid my long ponytail. My pink elastic band pressed into my wrist without forgiveness. My eyes blinked as I watched pieces I'd grown fall to the wood floor. After finishing, he petted my head until my spine began to fold, saying, “Girls are so beautiful with long hair.” He insisted on being the only one who could handle my haircuts until I became old enough for an Avril Lavigne–inspired look in middle school.

After every visit to the salon, quiet in my pop-punk exterior, my feet and hands hurried to untie my shoes. The cut only an inch shorter than before. I heard him race with anticipation ready to berate me with: “Why did you get a boy haircut?” He pushed me into the mirror and spat. My mind dissociated as if a safer version of me watched from the other side of the glass.

In turn, I shaved stripes into my legs. I didn’t go all the way because I wanted boys to feel how unpleasant it was to press onto something that doesn’t want to lie flat. The hair surviving on my legs made it harder for them to interpret my desires merely as toys. I was not plastic and contained like my former hairdresser's growing collection of dolls, ready to be carted to conventions for display and purchase. He bragged to strangers about how untouched the dolls were. I was jealous.

He groomed me; he bought me Intuition razors, but I paid for them. My eyes got lost in the strawberry-patterned wallpaper. He picked my Fruit of the Loom underwear as if it was ripe.

I wore my hair in a ponytail every day for the next five years. Up until the tenth grade, my mother tied it up for me. It was my way of making something go away, even when it couldn't. The golden strands dangled down my back like a friendship bracelet I could never attach to my own skin. The summer before my senior year of high school, my Summer Camp Ambiguous Friend-Date told me, “I like your hair better when you wear it down.” I gave my hair tie to him, as everything I had been holding back fell to my chest. I wore my locks down for the rest of the school year, attempting to stick to our classic camp-parting promise of “don’t change.”

I sat pretty for this boy across the computer screen—even if that meant my unkempt hair made me more afraid of my body, afraid for my body. My nightly ritual included shutting down my overheated laptop and tying together friendship bracelets from camp to lock my bedroom door, fully knowing that my nightmares could make it could come undone. I felt safe being beautiful for my Summer Camp Ambiguous Friend-Date only because he lived on the opposite coast, too far away to ever touch me.

My reflection was never my own until I chose to change, to realize the way that I was growing wasn't natural.

At first I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror because I wasn’t hiding. My trim exposed more of my face every year through college until I took a magazine clipping of a boy to the barber and said, “I want to look like that.” She didn't believe me and kept the sides long enough to blanket my ears so “I wouldn't have to live with the regret.” I sent a mass text to friends and family as if asking for permission, “SHOULD I CUT MY HAIR? DO I DO IT?” Soon I started to cut my own.

I had to trust that people could love me even if my pixie cut transitioned into an awkward mullet, mad-scientist punk, or kindergarten chic. I grew in the way that I did and not as a reflection of the kind of beauty someone wanted to possess. Classmates began to cut my hair, and I cut theirs in exchange. I was slowly learning that not everyone who held my head was looking to manipulate it. Unlike letting some man cut into me what he wanted to see, I looked to the community to help me shape the ways I wanted to grow.

On an autumn day, I sat on the porch that overlooked the patient bicycles and stray cats. My friend who became dear to me through a semester of dancing together emerged through the swinging screen door and lifted off her shirt. She was calm; there were no mirrors, only a mailbox and fallen leaves. We'd shared many dances before where we simply sat back to back. Craft scissors rested between my palms as she requested, “Cut it as short as you can on the side.” The breeze of passing pickup trucks carried away the emancipated strands. No one paid for her hair; no one owned it. It just became a part of nature, as we quietly planned where we would go next.